Reboots and Rethinking Linking

If you’re a bit perplexed by the look of things around here, feel free to take your time and explore for a bit. Despite changing the look of The Roost back in January, I thought we could use a bit of an update. This is the result of that update.

Let me know if there are any problems with the layout and where to find everything. I’ll be adding and subtracting a few things here and there as we fix some little issues, but this is how things should look around here for the a while. I’m… I’m tired.

Here are some random things I’ve been thinking about this week, other than hexadecimal color codes and CSS.

Since we last visited the Bills’ blackout policy on the Roost, Brian Higgins has meandered back towards the microphone and gave it another go. This time with some legislation.

In a letter to NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell, the lawmakers suggested that the league drop part of the eased blackout policy. The provision requires teams that adopt the new policy to forgo a large portion of their ticket revenue once 85 percent of the nonpremium tickets to any game are sold, forcing them instead to place that revenue in a leaguewide pool.

And if the league does not want to drop that part of the policy, the lawmakers suggested that for two games per year, teams be allowed to waive the blackout once 85 percent of their nonpremium tickets are sold, without having to turn over that extra ticket revenue.

In other words, let’s take the flex scheduling NBC gets to use late in the season and give it to owners. That way if it it gets too cold or their franchise stinks up the joint, fans can still watch the games. It’s a nice way to makes sure owners don’t get fleeced all around, and maybe it slowly tears down the iron curtain of blackouts. You know, sometime in the next decade.

The (current) revenue penalty “dissuades teams from adopting this new policy” and instead encourages them to stick to the old policy of blacking out games if they are not sold out 72 hours before kickoff, wrote Higgins, D-Buffalo, in a letter that also was signed by Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, and Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

It’s good to see that Higgins re-read the initial blackout policy rules, the ones he was championing just a few weeks ago. Excelsior and all that.

This was on Artvoice first, but one of the greatest Buffalo-based Tumblr sites of all time recently launched: Buffalo News Comments. There is no context or explanation given, just a pure stream of ignorance usually found flowing beneath a nugget of journalism on TBN’s site. It’s a vortex of hatred and politics, with your real name and hometown attached.

My favorite commenter thus far is Chuck Goodspeed, if only because I’d like to imagine I could walk to his house from my own and hear him typing and cackling maniacally while Matlock plays on the black and white.

We may have to play a game with these comments on our next podcast. Something similar to the Kasper’s Korner game Brad Riter used to play where we read the comment and have to guess what story he’s talking about. This may be harder than it seems.

I have a bunch of artwork waiting to be framed and hung in various places and I’m simply too lazy to frame and hang them. This project, though, makes me want to add one more thing to the pile. An artist named Marty Hick is putting old ABA logos into thrift store landscapes. It looks quirky and awesome and I want one. Maybe of this guy, who showed up quite a bit in those old stadium programs from the 60s.

The scariest thing about cricket I read was this piece, which wondered if we would be forced to watch test matches because half of American sports would be locked out for the fall.

This The Morning News piece about cricket, however, is the best cricket piece I’ve ever read. Here’s a sample:

Cricket, like photographic film, or Tara Reid, is light-sensitive. A game can be called off simply because it’s getting a tad gloomy. This, from a cold, rainy, overcast, gloomy nation like England seems incongruous. But cricket was invented for a reason. And that reason was sandwiches.